America shows politics of a sort is a real threat to democracy

By Michael Duffy

October 11, 2008 — 11.00am

Politics in America is notoriously more partisan and passionate than here. This is often put down to its voluntary voting system, which can make it more important for politicians to excite those with an interest in politics (and persuade them to turn out to vote) than persuade the uninterested, who will never vote.

But a new book suggests a very different reason for this partisanship, which it claims is getting even more ferocious. The book's called The Big Sort, and its argument is that Americans are now clustering in like-minded communities, which increases political polarisation.

The author and small-town journalist, Bill Bishop, says 100 million Americans moved from one county to another in the past decade, and thanks to increased prosperity and information they had more choice about where they went than before and were more likely to move to places where there were people like themselves. They were chasing lifestyle, but lifestyle has political implications. (Bishop told me a key difference between Democrats and Republicans is: "Lawn chemicals. The physical distance between homes is the best indicator: Republicans are more likely to have grass around their house.")

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One reason America can sort itself so effectively is because of its huge number of towns and small cities, which provide a great range of choice. This is not just a matter of its larger population: about 70 per cent of Americans live on farms or in towns or cities with fewer than 500,000 people. This is why a politician with a background such as Sarah Palin's makes more sense to many Americans than she does to far more urbanised people in countries such as Australia.

As a result of the big sort, although the national divide between the big parties has persisted, the number of electorates where there was a landslide to either party has doubled in recent elections. Neighbourhoods, says Bishop, have become "politically monogamous". He notes that social psychologists have studied like-minded groups and found that as they hear their beliefs continually reflected and amplified, they become more extreme.

Looking back he says, "What had happened over three decades wasn't a simple increase in political partisanship, but a more fundamental kind of self-perpetuating, self-reinforcing social division … Americans now had unprecedented choice about where and how they wanted to live. They had incredible physical and economic mobility - but these freedoms seemed only to have increased segregation, not lessened it."

Changes in technology and culture hastened this process. Thanks to cable TV and the internet, it is possible for individuals to construct media worlds for themselves that match their neighbourhoods, where they will never encounter an idea or opinion with which they disagree.

So, Bishop says, "we now live in a giant feedback loop", with "Balkanised communities whose inhabitants find other Americans to be culturally incomprehensible; a growing intolerance for political differences that has made national consensus impossible; and politics so polarised Congress is stymied and elections are no longer just contests over policies, but bitter choices between ways of life."

Leaders are more strident. An examination of Congressional voting records shows members are far more likely than in the past to take extreme positions.

Does this matter? Bishop says it does, because healthy democracy depends on maintaining connections with other people at some level. You might differ from someone else on health care or foreign policy or school vouchers, but when you differ on everything, there is a risk opponents will become enemies and democracy will start to break down.

Another reason an increase in passion in politics matters is because it drives out the moderates on whom compromise depends. One section of Bishop's book has the strangely moving heading "The benefits of apathy" and sounds like a description of Australian democracy, with its compulsory voting. He quotes research by the sociologist Paul Lazarsfeld showing that in less polarised situations, "Indifferent citizens leavened the system, gave it suppleness, just what the partisan personality lacked. Apathy gave politicians room to manoeuvre, compromise, make deals, smother grease on the gears of representative democracy. Having people who didn't give a flip about politics helped hold society together and cushioned the nation from the shock of disagreement and change."

So has Australia seen a big sort? There have been some concentrations. Fifty years ago the rich and the poor lived much closer to each other. The burghers of Woollahra, for example, had to travel through Paddington and Darlinghurst to reach the city, often on the same trams used by the poorer inhabitants of those suburbs. Today the working class has been pushed away from the coast, and the middle classes are unlikely to catch public transport, except when commuting with people like themselves. (One is reminded of Margaret Atwood's novel Oryx And Crake, where the wealthy live in compounds and travel in sealed trains so they do not meet inhabitants of the pleeblands.) As in America, the mass media has broken up so we can all pick what reflects our existing interests and ideas.

Antony Green, an election expert with the ABC here, agrees Australia has had some geographic sorting, but not nearly as much as in America. He thinks different voting systems still explain a lot of the difference between politics here and in America. He notes, too, some of the advantages of apathy. "Because of compulsory voting," he says, "Australian politicians have to appeal to the alienated and the non-interested. They have to cater to them, too."

I have always been in favour of voluntary voting. But reading Bishop's account of what's happening in America, I am having second thoughts.